antiquarianism

“Without resorting to self-conscious anachronism or fussy antiquarianism,” Scott wrote, “Gerwig has fashioned a story that feels at once entirely true to its 19th-century origins and utterly modern.”

Certainly, you can read Maxwell through a double-glazed, rose-tinted pane of antiquarianism.

Part of the problem with such exercises in antiquarianism and originalist literalism is that they miss the larger point about trying to translate 18th century legal principles and practices into modern terms.

Without resorting to self-conscious anachronism or fussy antiquarianism, Gerwig has fashioned a story that feels at once entirely true to its 19th-century origins and utterly modern.

Yet Sebald also extracts from this self-conscious antiquarianism something unaccountable: a mysterious contemporary stillness, an otherworldliness of the present.